Do you remember way back, oh, about ten months ago, when Breitbart tried to convince the world that alt-rightists were really just a bunch of lovable scallywags who didn’t actually believe all the horrible racist and anti-Semitic garbage they were so energetically dumping on the internet (and in the email inboxes of their assorted enemies) every day?
“Just as the kids of the 60s shocked their parents with promiscuity, long hair and rock’n’roll,” wrote Breitbart star Milo Yiannopoulos and his less colorful colleague Allum Bokhari, “so too do the alt-right’s young meme brigades shock older generations with outrageous caricatures, from the Jewish ‘Shlomo Shekelburg’ to ‘Remove Kebab,’ an internet in-joke about the Bosnian genocide.”
They don’t really hate Jews and Muslims, the Breitbart duo insisted. They just love memes too much!
Tell that to former alt-right podcasting star Mike Enoch, who plummeted to earth last weekend like some kind of Neo-Nazi Icarus after his fans found out that he’s married to … A JEW!
Enoch — whose real name turns out to be Mike Peinovich — is the founder of the alt-right blog The Right Stuff and was the host of the rather depressingly popular podcast The Daily Shoah. Yes, the name is a HILARIOUS Holocaust pun.
“In his online persona,” Salon notes in a fairly detailed post on this imbroglio,
Peinovich routinely cracked jokes about killing Jewish people and forcibly deporting Muslims and people of African descent. The weekly program had roughly 100,000 regular listeners, many of whom regularly sent in financial donations by PayPal or bought merchandise from the site.
Peinovich’s secret life as a Jew-loving Nazi ceased being secret after he was pretty thoroughly doxed — apparently (as far as I can figure out) as a result of some complicated internecine warfare between The Right Stuff and 8chan, with an assist from some anti-fascist activists and a cameo from none other than Juicebro Lawyer Mike Cernovich.
After initially lying to Salon about his identity, Peinovich ultimately decided to fess up.
“As I am sure you all know,” he wrote in a message to his fans and detractors,
I was doxxed and an ill advised attempt to fool the media about my identity led me to not talk to you people and to try to simply ride it out by being silent. This was irresponsible and a disservice to all of you. Yes my wife is who they say she is, I won’t even bother denying it, I won’t bother making excuses. …
I could try to explain my whole life for the last ten years to you but what difference at this point would it make. Life isn’t perfect.
Shortly afterwards, he resigned from TRS.
You may be wondering: did his wife know? Yes. Weirdly, as Salon notes,
Peinovich’s wife … even appeared on “The Daily Shoah” several times, including a special holiday-season segment in 2015 where she read a neo-Nazi parody of “The Night Before Christmas.” Introducing the clip, which can be found online, Peinovich said his wife was “very proud of it.”
I’m afraid I will have to resort to a gif to convey my thoughts on this aspect of the story.
As Salon points out, “[s]ome listeners of ‘The Daily Shoah’ were crestfallen” about the Jewish wife revelations, with one poor fellow complaining:
It’s pretty bad for your WN, fourth reich, neo-nazi, facist movement when one of the head guys happens to be married to a Jew.
The reverberations of NaziDudeMarriedToAJew-Gate continue to (((echo))) across the alt-rightosphere.
On The Daily Stormer, Andrew Anglin has been trying to convince his fellow Nazis not to fall headlong into conspiracy theory. Despite what he calls the “Jew wife situation,” he defends Peinovich as an effective propagandist against the allegedly evil Jews, despite being married to one of them.
I don’t think that Mike is a shill, or that this Jew wife situation indicated that he is part of a Jewish conspiracy.
Mike and TRS have been at the forefront of exposing the Jewish problem. They are, along with this website, and some older figures such as David Duke, the only people really going hard on the Jews.
The situation seems pretty self-explanatory. He was married ten years ago, long before he was aware of the Jew problem, and so he felt was locked into a situation.
That is not to say he handled it well. At the very least, he should have known that eventually he was going to get doxed, and been prepared for this. Really, he should have gotten a divorce.
But hey, Nazi water under the Nazi bridge.
As far as if he actually did betray anyone – no. He was obviously dishonest on some level, but if we look at his contribution, and ask ourselves “did this forward the 14 words?” we will see that it did, and the weirdness in his personal life doesn’t change that. …
I mean, this is the guy responsible for the (((echoes))) meme, which was one of the biggest propaganda coups since the death of Adolf Hitler. Dismissing everything he did over a personal failing would be wrong.
On Infostormer — which is a whole different website than the Daily Stormer — the blogger who calls himself Marcus Cicero is urging other alt-rightists to “Move Forward From The Mike Enoch Jew Wife Incident Without Absolute Chaos,” as he puts it in the headline of his first post on the subject.
In a followup post, he tries to spin the news coverage of the “Mike Ench Jew Wife Incident” as possibly good for the Nazis.
“We need to look at this from a positive standpoint,” he writes.
The fact that this incident is getting any mainstream coverage at all illustrates how much of a political force we’ve become. A few years back, nobody would have paid attention to something like this.
This is also not the time for witch hunts. There will be anti-fascists and Jews posing as Nazis trying to use this situation to accuse other content producers of being Jews, untrustworthy or whatever. We should not fall into that trap. The best way to handle this is to simply move forward and continue calling out these vermin.
But the most, well, intriguing reaction comes on the podcast The Daily Traditionalist, the host of which is also urging fellow, er, “traditonalists” to remember all the good work Peinovich did in the eternal struggle against, well, people like his wife.
“It may be startling to some to hear the sort of behaviour his wife engages in,” guest Matt Parrott argues, according to the official summary of the show posted on The Daily Stormer, “but they do live in New York and it is the world center of that sort of degeneracy.”
I can only imagine what sort of filthy Jewishness this woman gets up to. Enjoying some lovely brisket? Humming “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof? Complaining about the humidity? It is too horrifying to contemplate.
https://youtu.be/1ytCEuuW2_A
The cognitive dissonance of a bigot unable to comprehend the possibility of his nazi cohorts consuming him when his wife is jewish is astounding.
Writing up a timeline on this fiasco now.
David Futrelle,
This is something that wouldn’t be shocking to just about any other group of people. Normal people don’t think about, him is this guy’s wife Jewish and end up being shocked and horrified when it turns out she is. Of course these are Nazis, we are talking about. Jews are the ultimate evil to them.
Or more likely, Mr. Peinovich and his wife realized the alt-right hate peddling machine is a lucrative cash grab.
wait… the (((((((echoes)))))))))))))) are effective propaganda?
Fuck everyone involved in this shitshow.
I’m scared for her.
I honestly have to wonder what goes through the mind of a woman who marries a guy like this. Did she simply not KNOW what he was? And if she DID know…why did she stay with him? Did she seriously believe he only meant “all those OTHER Jews, NOT me”?
Shaking my damn head, all day long.
I have to go watch that old Tom Berenger movie again. Betrayed. About a woman who falls in love with a white supremacist, and ends up ratting him out to the feds when the dude’s sheet-wearin’ finally gets to her. Not sure if I’ll get any closer to what was in this guy’s wife’s head that way, but it can’t hurt to try.
I’ll tell you what I’m not going to do, and it’s click a YouTube link left without context by a first-time commenter.
Viscaria, it’s just the “Loser” sound effect from The Price is Right.
Ta, TheKaraokeSinger!
He can’t seriously believe that, can he? Unless he doesn’t know what eye-rolling means.
I had a lyrical moment:
The alt-right’s full of posers
and purple-tinted prosers
I hope one day
They’ll go away
because “Heil Hitler”? No, sir!
When I was applying for Big Brother/Big Sister for my son, I got a call from the group. They had found a Big Brother they thought would be suitable, but were afraid I would be unhappy with him. The reason? He was Jewish.
My jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe I was hearing this in the 1990s. I checked the calendar; yep, I hadn’t been teleported back to the 1940s. I stammered something, and then cleared my head and announced that I had no problem at all with my son (who was an atheist) having a Jewish Big Brother.
Apparently there had been several people who had refused to allow the man near their children. Afraid he’d eat them? Probably not. He was vegetarian (another strike against him where I lived) – or was that just a cover, so no one would believe he drank the blood of Christian children?
@HD!
Hoi, there’s a nice little bit. Maybe we could collab someday.
This is a good example of how “ironic racism” cannot truly be distanced from from regular racism as Brietbarters claim, it’s just as violent and white supremacists will not give preferential treatment to those who they consider the enemy, even the dumdums who “ironically” shill for them. I predict we’ll see a lot of examples like this in future, where “ironic racist” dumdums who backed the Nazis just to grow their follower accounts get doxxed, harrassed and dispatched, perhaps they’ll ask themselves if it was really worth bringing their attackers to power but I doubt it.
When will people learn, hate groups gonna hate? There’s no one of the good ones. They will always turn on you.
BoinkBoink: yep.
Those idiots who defend him are trying to preserve their own cash-grabbing “sites”, and that amuses me immensely.
This.
However, I don’t know how I personally feel about this thing that keeps popping up whenever we see someone get into this shit, the whole “They’re just fleecing the assholes!” idea. I’ve seen variations of this here as well with the whole “They don’t really believe this! They’re just fucking with the neo-nazis!” or “They’re just being ironic!”
[Insert line here about “ironically fucking goats”]
Like, yeah, I want to believe that there aren’t as many horrible people in the world that would would believe the kind of shit that these neo-nazis believe, but at the same time, these people have been doing this shit for years.
That’s a hell of a long time for a con. Especially one that couldn’t have netted them much cash at first, and I doubt that these people have the foresight to predict that shit like Trump would happen.
At the same time: If they’re comfortable enough with them to shout their ideology from the rooftops, they’re just as fucking bad as the neo-nazis themselves. Pretending to be a nazi for money is just as bad as being a fucking nazi, IMO. They are still causing harm because they are indistinguishable from the real fucking thing.
I guess what I’m getting at is: Don’t give these assholes the benefit of the doubt just because they’re turning a quick buck on the neo-nazi bullshit. They’re just as bad and still deserve our condemnation for it.
I’ve come to the conclusion that people who “Pretend” to be neo-Nazis for money are even worse than true believers. The true believers at least think they’re doing the right thing (they’re breaking new and unheard-of ground in being wrong, of course, but that’s beside the point); the con artists are fully aware they’re not and just don’t fucking care. Who cares how many people are killed or worse as a direct result of their lies when there’s money to be made! *barfs*
And what the hell kind of world are we living in where we need to rank the puppy-strangling evilness of different flavours of neo-Nazi?
WOAH! Chelsea Manning to be released in May! Of this year! Thanks, Obama!
“Nazi discovered to be marginally less horrible than he pretended to be: Resigns in shame.”
This literally sounds like a story from The Onion.
There’s a part of me that realizes all the work you do here David is of utmost importance in fighting fascism and Trumpism, but another just thinks most of this is just humor. I swear to whichever deity some of these people just outdo themselves on the stupidity factor.
“You are what you pretend to be, so you should be very careful what you pretend to be.” Kurt Vonnegut